Chapter 21.5- One Thousand Hands

“You made a fuinjutsu supervirus?” Orochimaru was the one to hiss the words as his wide eyes narrowed at my form.

“Well, not really”

“Explain yourself, Shorirama. No more prevaricating” Hiruzen’s words were delivered cooly and calmly, but I could see the way his grip had tightened around his staff. It wasn’t the Monkey King, just a general training staff, but I had no doubts that he could kill me a billion times with it before I could even blink.

“Well, we would be done already if all of you didn’t keep interrupting” I quipped, but there was not a single smile. Just narrowed eyes and evaluating gazes. Tsunade looked like she was about to pull her hair out in frustration, and even more worryingly she somehow looked like she was contemplating picking me up and making a dash for it. The way her eyes flickered across her teammates and Sensei and then towards the direction I knew the Clan Compound was at, and then back at me was quite telling. Of course, I could see her from behind my head so maybe she would have been less obvious if she was within traditional line of sight.

“Okay then. I’ll explain. So my Grandfather left these notes behind. Lost of stuff about the Wood release that doesn’t really work for me, but some of the ramblings about nature energy and the energy that runs through nature stuck. So I managed too so some thinking and I created an artificial compound that eats the stuff.”

“What kind of artificial compound? Details please” Orochimaru pressed, and I resisted the urge to push back at the snake whose own later actions in the anime had actually inspired the creation of these things.

“Well, it’s two parts my blood, and five parts tree sap from the trees my Grandfather made. Putting them together seems to create a substance that hungers for natural energy more than any other thing I’ve ever seen. If I supercharge the hunger with my own chakra then the compound gets even hungrier so it basically eats through most things that have natural energy. So trees, walls made of earth release, the like.” I finally explained to the still narrowed looks of all those around me.

“So you decided that a training session was the best place to demo this and not in a safe, controlled environment, why exactly?” Tsunade’s tone was acerbic. It seems she’d decided that I was no longer in danger of being executed for crimes against humanity so she was joining in on the ‘let’s rip into Shori festival’.

“There wasn’t any real danger”

“Any one of us could have fallen in, boy. I know we make a good simulation of it, but none of us come at you with intent to kill so it would behoove you to do the same” Orochimaru now piped up. Traitorous snake that he was destined to become, I could not let his words stand so I did the first thing that popped in my mind. I reached down to the water that still remained beneath me in a quickly disappearing puddle and commanded it to shoot forwards.

Not seeing the attack, it washed right over Orochimaru, soaking him to the bone. His hands were lifted instinctively, and before I could blink, there was a staff hovering between my eyes.

“Wh-what?” He stumbled and said, still struggling to get over the feeling.

“For some reason or the other, the compound becomes inert once it clashes with a shinobi’s chakra. Like I said, there wasn’t any real danger” I said as smugly as I could while having to speak around my heart that had risen to my throat.

A/N; Today’s bit